80 I f the Seventies ended with a whimper, the Eighties arrived with a bang: an explosion of gaudy fashions, innovative sounds and boundless energy. Yet our response to the music of the time remains equivocal: a mixture of fondness and faint embarrassment. There’s no doubting it was a time that delivered some sublime recordings, but as yet we don’t quite have licence to enjoy them unironically. See, for example, the “school disco†craze at the turn of the millennium, when the price for enjoying a night of Eighties pop was to dress up as a member of the Grange Hill cast; or the endless Eighties CD compilations advertised on television with spinning Rubik’s Cube graphics and archly knowing voice-overs. Time, perhaps, to let our guard down – and shamelessly recall one of the most colourful and vibrant chapters in British music.
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH MUSIC
Adam and the Ants
New Romantics and the video age Ridicule, Adam Ant assured us in his 1981 hit Prince Charming, was nothing to be scared of. And well he might, being dressed as the frilled-up offspring of Dick Turpin and Liberace, leading a room full of Regency fops in that infamous arm-crossing dance. So it’s not difficult to see why the Eighties came to be maligned as the decade when style gained the whip hand over musical substance (though for the New Romantics, this was close to a manifesto). What made it all possible was the rise of the pop video. The video age began in earnest on August 1, 1981, when MTV launched in the US with a manifesto of its own: the Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star. It took six more years for the channel to reach Britain but video took less time to kill off a mainstay of British pop-music culture: the dance troupes on Top of the Pops. As a promo clip became essential to accompany every major single release, Zoo — successors to the more fondly remembered Pan’s People, Legs & Co and Ruby Flipper — were quietly edged into retirement. David Bowie’s video for his chart-topper Ashes to Ashes — at the time, the most expensive ever made — set the tone for a whole generation of clips that walked a tightrope between flamboyant and pretentious (and which were superbly parodied by the Not The Nine O’Clock News team in Nice Video, Shame About the Song). Among the most successful practitioners of the art were directing duo Godley and Creme, once half of art-rock group 10cc. Their videography reads like an index of our collective Eighties memories: Fade to Grey by Visage; Every Breath You Take by the Police; Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood; and Girls on Film and A View to a Kill by Duran Duran. Another Duran video, though, best evokes the spirit of the age. For Rio, director Russell Mulcahy spirited the boys off to the Caribbean, dressed them in expensive pastel suits and shoved them onto a yacht. Here, they were mocked by a skimpily clad model covered in body paint but appeared to take it in good heart. The message was a simple one that struck a chord in the decade of conspicuous wealth: why be scared of ridicule when you’ve got this much dosh?
Duran Duran
Synthpop pioneers are top of the bops In 1962, Decca Records famously declined to sign The Beatles on the basis that “guitar groups are on their way outâ€. Twenty years later, it seemed as though this prophecy might finally come good. The Eighties, it was widely agreed, would be the decade of the synthesizer. Home-grown electronic pop had climbed up the charts before, but it had often been self-referentially quirky (such as M’s Pop Muzik), or sci-fi dystopian, as with the works of John Foxx and Gary Numan. The Eighties saw the synthetic sound enter the mainstream, with some of its proponents worshipped as pin-ups. The British synthpop pioneers were a diverse bunch. The Midge Ure-fronted Ultravox cultivated a sophisticated film noir image and sound — cruelly undercut by their signature hit Vienna stalling at number two under Joe Dolce’s Shaddap You Face. Basildon boys Depeche Mode were perhaps the first electronic boy band, their candyfloss melodies and saccharine lyrics giving no hint of their later incarnation as stadium-filling spokesmen for teenage angst. OMD — Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark — delivered deceptively jaunty songs on such subjects as Joan of Arc, Stanlow oil refinery, and even Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that levelled Hiroshima. But if one record stands as the totem of early Eighties synthpop, it is The Human League’s 1981 release Dare. At the start of the year, the League had been written off by many in the rock press. Musical differences had caused the two founder members, Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, to walk out; they would later enjoy their own spell of chart success as Heaven 17. Frontman Phil Oakey, determined to take a more poppy direction, had reacted by recruiting two schoolgirls he saw on the dance floor of a Sheffield nightclub as backing singers. Under the supervision of production whiz Martin Rushent, The Human League produced an album that had the critics choking on their words. Dare, recorded using only electronic instruments, shot to number one, eventually going tripleplatinum. It remains a milestone in British music, its clean, expansive sound setting a new paradigm for pure pop — most memorably in its fourth hit single, the transatlantic number one Don’t You Want Me. Its influence was gladly The Human League acknowledged by Phil Oakey on a 2001 documentary, in which he quoted a headline in New Musical Express from his group’s glory days: “The Human League — one day, all music will be made like this. And it is!â€
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH The Daily Telegraph Saturday, October 18, 2008 telegraph.co.uk /gordonsgin In association with
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